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"normal" potions:
you will have to find ingredients, recipe and brew the potion
everyone of those created potions will refill when you rest
you can "load" potions and then release them during combat (they will have a short duration)
you can loose toxicity from consuming potions over time or by resting

Better Recipes/Upgrades for the same potion can be found throughout the world

"mutagenic" potions:
you will have to rest to drink AND activate them
they have a permanent effect and toxicity
you can cancel the effect while resting or replace/add other mutagens

CDPR says that should give players the option to "go hardcore" and mix mutagens/potions/toxicity to maximum effect while "casual" players can just use mutagens with an occasional swallow.
I hope that works out and that upgrades/mutagens are tied to quests/exploration/challenges.

Yep, the auto-refill sounds bad, a dev on the CDPR forum said they are still tuning it and auto-refill is not set in stone.
But they do want to prevent players hording potions, they want them to use them constantly. We will see how it turns out.
There was no mention of a cat potion, its implementation in TW2 as a X-Ray Vision was not really lore-friendly (or used by anyone if he was sane), so either they got rid of it or change it imo.

At least in TW1 on the highest difficulty you had to use potions constantly. I think this kind of balancing is the best, as it is most true to the fantasy world IMHO: Geralt is superhumanly fast fencer (although not in the video games unfortunately), so definitely able to defeat a few other fighters, but the one-man-army stuff from the games shouldn't go without that little extra push.

You can finish TW2 w/o potions on Dark, that is true.....but efficient ? Not really.
You are much more prone to make a mistake if it takes forever to kill enemies instead of one hit. But I agree that on the highest difficulties it should not be possible to survive w/o a potion.
Although I have no solution how to prevent skilled players to circumvent damage with the current way combat works atm. Don't know about TW3 but they said a few times that all demos were played
on easy with additionally toned down monsters and they used a dev sword.

So I'm still playing through the first one (I've been going very slowly, so I've made it to Act IV in… maybe a year), but I just installed the second one, which I know is notoriously poorly optimized. I have a Macbook Pro and run boot camp, so i decided to install it on OSX and in boot camp and compare performance. I can basically run any game I've tried on ultra on the boot camp side (Infinite, the Arkham games, Nu Thief, Far Cry 3, etc.), but this game was laggy and had very long load times. The OSX version is just the same thing in a wineskin wrapper rather than a true port, so I expected it to run like crap. Get this… on the same graphical settings, the OSX wineskin version ran far better than the native windows version with the latest graphics drivers. Considerably faster load times, no frame rate slowdowns, same graphical quality. I really don't get it. O.o

It is the game I am looking forward to the most in many years.
Probably my most-anticipated game since Skyrim.

I couldn't care less what happens with consoles. The fact that The Witcher 3 uses so many resources that a new console doesn't have the power to play it on ultra is a big plus for me. More eyecandy is always better. I have a gtx680 now. I might actually buy a gtx980 or something like that if the 20nm GPUs become available in time. And this game will be my main motivation for spending that money.

It was on my list right below NuThief and above any possible STALKER sequel. It seems that I should have been smarter and placed it in the first position. I hope I will not be disappointed this time.

I couldn't care less what happens with consoles.

Let's just hope that CDPR will not decide to remove some of that "eyecandy" from PC version in order to "provide the same experience on all platforms". I need to buy a new PC this year, but I am still waiting till CDPR announces system requirements for this game.

For me it is more a case of trying to avoid hearing too much about it as I don't want to spoil the experience. I loved the first 2 games am looking forward to see where they take this final episode to.

I liked that he admitted that the sweeshing sound of drawn swords is a Hollywood trope. A bit sad that they didn't completely get rid of it, though. But then again, the also fencing is still Hollywood-like ridiculous mostly, so I shouldn't hope for revelations in that aspect in the first place. I do admit that I've enjoyed all two soundtracks so far, I have them ready in my car.